


Elliptic Orbit

by Rhiannon87



Series: Some Sort of Crazy [3]
Category: Uncharted
Genre: Break Up, Dating, F/M, Long-Distance Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-26
Updated: 2016-03-26
Packaged: 2018-05-29 06:22:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6363007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhiannon87/pseuds/Rhiannon87
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They can't stay close, but they can't stay away from each other, either. Nate and Elena, after El Dorado and before Nepal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Elliptic Orbit

**Author's Note:**

> This is a revised/rewritten version of the fic. The original can be found [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/406488).

Nate sighed as he skimmed through price estimates on hiring a deep-sea diving ship and corresponding gear. This was why he'd conned Elena's producers into financing the search for Drake's coffin. These things were expensive, and he barely had the money to cover next month's rent as it was. Ideally, getting his hands on the treasure that had supposedly sank with a pirate ship off the coast of Angola would solve his financial problems, at least for a little while.

Too bad El Dorado had been such a disaster that now Elena's show wouldn't touch him with a ten-foot pole. It'd be fun to work with her again like that. Nate smiled to himself. Maybe he could convince her to come with him on one of his jobs sometime soon-- this time, without a camera.

He'd been out to California to see her only a few times since the whole mess with Drake and El Dorado and Roman back in July. But they talked all the time, e-mails or texts or phone calls that lasted for hours. Normally he was pretty lousy at keeping in touch, but he wanted to hear from Elena. Wanted to tell her about the things he'd seen or the places he'd been, all the things that made him think of her. A lot of things had made him think of her in the handful of months since they'd met.

Nate frowned at the screen of his laptop, then shrugged and started looking up flights to L.A. He hadn't been out there in nearly three weeks, and Elena had said she'd be in town for the weekend, at least. He could fly out tomorrow and spend a couple days with her. He'd figure out some way to pay the rent when he got back

*

Elena had always known the history show wasn’t a long-term thing. She’d get a couple seasons, if she was lucky, but after that… she hadn’t really had any solid plans. There had always been a part of her that had seen the poverty and corruption in the places she’d traveled, but she’d told herself there wasn’t anything she could do. She had a history show on Discovery, for god’s sake, she could hardly change the world from there.

But after what happened on that island, with El Dorado and Navarro’s plans for it, none of that was a good enough excuse anymore. She had a camera and a voice, and she knew how to use both of them to get people to listen to her. She dug into Atoq Navarro and Gabriel Roman, tracing both of their lives back, looking for clues about who was out there that would have been willing to buy El Dorado. And she started reaching out to contacts at other networks, trying to see if anyone would be interested in taking on another investigative journalist.

She’d half-expected Nate to lose interest, in her work or in her, now that she wasn’t focusing on history the way he did. But not only did he give her as much information as he had on his late rival, he also backed her on the whole career change thing. He couldn’t do much to help her network or rewrite her CV; sometimes, though, it was even more helpful to have him listen to her vent about her doubts. “You’ll make it work,” he told her, after another informational interview had gone nowhere. “You’re good at this. They’ll see it eventually. You’re too stubborn for them not to.”

She finally got a break when a former colleague's producer agreed to bring her on for one story. Elena was already halfway to building a solid case exposing a ring of arms smugglers with ties to the diplomatic community in Guatemala; all she'd needed to finish it was the financial backing of a studio and a camera crew. Almost five months after escaping the island, her story aired, and she sat on the bed in her hotel room and hugged her knees to her chest while she watched it. It was a good, solid piece, and it would change things. It wouldn't save the whole world, she knew that, but this little chunk of it might be better.

When she woke up the next morning, it was to an inbox full of e-mails and a text from Nate. Most of the e-mails were alerts from her news feeds, telling her that two of the diplomatic staff involved in the smuggling ring were being recalled to their home countries to face charges. One was from the studio, an informal offer to work for them on a permanent basis. She sent a reply asking for a meeting to hammer out the details before she checked her phone.

_Nathan Drake: saw ur stry it was great! will tke u out to clebrte soon_

Elena grinned. _Definitely,_ she typed, _call me when you're back in the States._

*

Surprisingly, he and Elena managed to see each other slightly _more_ often after she took the investigative reporter position. She traveled more, yes, but she also spent more time in one place, usually. And there were jobs all over the world; it wasn’t too much extra effort for Nate to find work in the same general region as her. It was worth it, even if they only ended up seeing each other for a few hours a night, a few nights in a row.

He found himself looking forward to spending time at her apartment between trips, when they could just spend time together without worrying about interruptions from his sketchy contacts or her (to his mind) overly demanding producer. They watched movies or went out to the beach or just sprawled out on her couch and did research. She even tried to teach him to cook a few times, until a small kitchen fire and the destruction of a pan stopped that in its tracks. Fires aside, it was really nice. He was pretty much always happier after a long weekend at her place.

One of the rare mornings that he was out of bed first found him in the kitchen, preparing two mugs of coffee. Nate had a vague idea of taking them both back to Elena's bedroom. Staying in bed half the day sounded like a great plan.

“You didn’t break my new coffee maker, did you?” Elena asked from the doorway.

So much for his plans. “No, I did not,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I’m perfectly capable of making coffee without disaster.” He gave her mug a final stir and held it out to her.

Elena took her cup and gave the coffee a somewhat cautious sip. He supposed he couldn’t blame her for being suspicious; she liked hers with milk and a little sugar, whereas Nate liked his coffee black and extra sweet. He smiled when her suspicious look changed to surprise. “How’d I do?”

“Perfect,” she said, stepping closer and leaning up on her toes to kiss his cheek. “You want breakfast?”

“Yeah.” Nate brushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and Elena blinked at him, her expression going oddly serious for a second. Then she shook her head and turned to open the fridge.

Nate moved out of the way and tried not to think too hard about the sudden change in mood in the room. Things were good right now. They didn’t need to make it any more complicated.

*

If Elena was going to be honest, she’d been in love with Nathan Drake for a long time. It had taken six months of dating to admit it to herself, but there it was. She’d fallen in love with him, and she was pretty sure it was the stupidest thing she could have done.

Not that she could even really call it dating. They’d never put boundaries or labels on their relationship, never said it was exclusive or serious or any of that. She half-jokingly called him her long-distance not-boyfriend to her friends and pretended not to notice the skeptical looks they exchanged. She loved him, she wanted him to stick around, and if that meant moving slowly on the relationship, then so be it.

Still, there was moving slowly and then there was not moving at all, and as the months went on, it became clear that Nate was quite comfortable with the latter. Elena tried to raise the topic a few times, asked him what she should call their relationship or where he saw things going between them, and he brushed her off. They didn’t need really need labels, they could just see where things went, excuses and evasions. All of it added up to one undeniable conclusion: this wasn’t important to him. Nate was perfectly fine with their relationship so long as it didn’t require him to commit or make any changes in his life.

What would have been their one-year anniversary in a normal relationship rolled around, and Elena brought it up during one of their phone calls. Nate laughed it off and, within five minutes, invented some excuse to get off the phone. Elena scowled at her phone and thought that it might be less infuriating if he was just a little better at lying.

She knew he wasn’t going to change. She knew she should just break it off, end things so she could start moving on, but it was so much easier said than done. Another few months dragged on, the phone calls and visits become more strained and peppered with arguments, until finally she gave up. “Look, Nate, you can pretend this isn’t something serious all you want,” she snapped, pacing across her living room with her phone clutched in her hand, “but it’s been well over a year now. Anybody else would say we’re in a serious relationship, but you just…”

Nate made a frustrated noise. “Things were fine between us,” he said. “You went and added all these damn complications.”

She glared at the wall. “Wanting a committed relationship with someone I--” _someone I love,_ she nearly said, but she choked back the word at the last second. She wouldn’t tell him like this, not in a fight. Not as something to hurt them both. “I care about isn’t a complication,” she finished. “But if that’s how you see it, then this isn’t going to work.”

He was silent for several long seconds, and Elena closed her eyes, willing him to change his mind. To say that she was right, he was sorry, he wanted to make things work. She’d still be angry at him, but they could at least give it a try.

“I guess we’re done, then.”

Elena balled her free hand into a fist. “If that’s what you want,” she snapped and hung up the phone, then threw it at the couch. “Dammit, dammit, dammit, god _dammit_.”

She took a deep breath, then another, then jammed the sides of her hands against her eyes. No. She was not going to cry over him. Bastard didn’t deserve it. She was going to get drunk and call her friends and tell them they’d all been right. She’d been an idiot to stick with him for so long.

*

“Y'know, kid, when I said you didn't have to wait for me...” Sully began, sliding into the booth across from Nate and eying the considerable number of empty bottles on the table. Nate shrugged and took another drink. Sully frowned at him. “You and Elena fighting again?”

“We broke up,” Nate said, hating how hollow the words came out. It had been his choice. And it had been the right one-- she'd wanted him to be something he wasn't, and if he'd stayed, things would have ended even worse than they did. She'd probably have dumped him before too much longer. At least this way, he got out with his dignity intact.

None of that made it hurt any less.

Sully's eyebrows shot up. “Oh,” he said. “Sorry to hear that.”

Nate shrugged again. “It's for the best.”

“If you say so.”

He scowled and shook his head. Last thing he needed right now was Sully's commentary on his love life. “You said you had a job?”

“Yeah,” Sully said. “You remember Simon up in Montreal?”

“Yep.” Nate took another drink and waited for Sully to elaborate.

“He's got a potential client for us, guy who needs an off-the-books experts on Etruscan tombs.”

Nate raised an eyebrow. “And let me guess, you told him we were experts?”

“I figure you can become one by the time we land on Thursday,” Sully replied with a grin. He pulled a folded printout from his wallet and slid it across the table. Nate skimmed over the flight information and nodded. “You wanna crash at my place Wednesday instead of driving up from Key West?”

“Sure,” Nate said. The research would be a nice distraction, at least-- the days had seemed a lot longer without e-mails or texts from Elena to look forward to.

Montreal was brutally cold this late in the year. Nate spent most of his time indoors, holed up in one or another research library at the university, while Sully talked their client into fronting the money for a tomb-robbing trip to Italy. Nate kept bumping into a woman who was doing her own research on early Roman history; they started chatting, then flirting, and Nate only hesitated for a second before saying yes when she asked him out for drinks.

Maggie was a doctoral student, back in Montreal to finish up her thesis after spending most of the last year traveling around Italy. Nate was happy to listen to her talk about her research and commiserate over the pain of learning Latin, because it meant she wouldn't ask questions about what he was working on. She gave him her number after the first date, and when she invited him back to her place after the second, he said yes. It was simple and uncomplicated, just like he'd wanted.

He spent about a week and a half going on near-nightly dates and waking up in the morning half wondering why he was paying for a hotel room he wasn't sleeping in. Everything seemed to be going pretty well, even if he couldn't stop mentally comparing her to Elena. It would stop, eventually. He just had to give it time.

Nate showed up at her apartment to pick her up for another date, but instead of letting him come in, she stepped out into the hall. “So,” Maggie asked, folding her arms over her chest, “who is she?”

“What?”

She sighed. “The girl you're not over.”

Nate knew he should brush it off, tell her he had no idea what she was talking about. But what came out was, “That obvious, huh?”

Maggie shook her head and gave him a sad smile. “Look, Nate, you're a great guy, and this has been fun,” she said. “But I'm not interested in being a rebound right now.”

Nate winced. Even if she was right, the rejection still stung. But that's what best friends and bars were for, right? “I'm sorry,” he said.

“It's okay.” She unfolded her arms enough to wave one hand dismissively. “Like I said, it was fun. No hard feelings.”

He nodded. “Still. I'm sorry.”

She shrugged and took a step closer, leaning in to kiss his cheek. She was only an inch or two shorter than him, and so she didn't have to stand on tip-toe or tug his shoulder down to do it. Nate sighed as stepped back towards her door. “If you do get over her,” she said, “give me a call.”

“Yeah.”

“Take care, Nate,” she said, then shut the door. Nate sighed, frowning at the tacky carpet for a few moments, then started towards the stairs. He pulled out his phone as he went and pulled up Sully's number. Whatever bar his friend was at was exactly where he needed to be right now.

*

The first few weeks after the break up weren’t great ones. Elena dealt with being heartbroken and furious by venting to sympathetic friends, letting those friends take her out drinking, and having a handful of one-night stands. It helped, after getting dumped, to know that other people wanted her, could make her feel good. And if she went into a few of those hook-ups thinking about how it would hurt Nate if he knew, well, that was her problem to deal with.

She started off the new year with an assignment in Romania. The world of illegal arms dealing was truly global, and over the last year, her stories had taken her from Central America to the Mediterranean to Eastern Europe. It was a huge, overwhelming problem, and one that she couldn’t walk away from. Most of the groups she encountered didn’t stop at weapons smuggling; drugs, contraband, and human trafficking were usually on the docket as well. The weapons shipments impounded, the people rescued, the corrupt officials exposed—it wouldn’t take down the whole international network, but she was making a difference.

That was what got her through the worst days. When she hadn’t slept for thirty hours or she’d been blockaded by politicians or when she’d seen another criminal escape justice, it helped to know that there were people out there—people whose names and faces she knew, people who’d told her about their hopes and families and lives—that she’d helped. She saw some of the ugliest parts of humanity, but she got to see some of the best, too. That made it easier to keep pushing forward.

She couldn’t spend all her time in the field, though, even if sometimes she wanted to. The research she did was just as vital to her stories as the interviews done on the ground, but being at home meant it was harder for her to ignore the fact that even after all these months, she still missed Nate. Still loved him. She saw things that reminded her of him all the time, but that was easier to deal with than finding the things he’d left behind in her apartment. The spare shirts and the extra toothbrush and, every so often, the little notes or sketches he’d tucked into her books.

Elena knew she should probably send the clothes back, at least, but she just never got around to it. She’d left some of her things at his place, too, and he hadn’t sent them back. And she didn’t have to heart to call and ask for them.

So she missed him, and she did her best to focus on her work so she wouldn’t have to think about it so much. There was plenty to focus on, especially now that she’d moved into Eastern Europe. Patterns were emerging, weapons and mercenaries all funneling into one very wealthy sinkhole. Someone in Serbia was building an army—for what purpose, she wasn’t sure. But she’d find out, and then make sure that whoever was behind it didn't get the chance to put that army to use.

*

He couldn't stop thinking about her.

Nate had never really gotten this hung up on a woman before—sure, he’d nursed a few long-term crushes, and he usually moped around for a few weeks after getting dumped. But Elena was different. Of course she was, he really should have expected this, she’d always been different. Or maybe it would have been easier to get over her if he didn't keep seeing her face everywhere he went.

Well, not quite everywhere. But she was a reporter, and most airport lounges kept their TVs tuned to the news. With how often he traveled, it probably would have been more surprising if he hadn't seen her on the news once or twice. And every time he did, it surprised him how the sight of her left a dull ache in his chest. He should've been over her by now.

Late July found him stranded in Greece, broke after a deal had gone sour. He knew he needed to find work soon, get enough cash to pay for his shitty hotel and fly back to the States, but instead he was drinking at an empty beachside bar and wallowing in loneliness. It had been over two years since he'd met Elena, and he was pretty sure that there wasn't a day that had gone by since that he hadn't thought of her. He'd missed her every single day since he'd broken things off, and it was becoming clear that he'd made a mistake.

He still had her number and her e-mail address. He could call her, write her a note, but what would he even say? “Sorry I was an asshole, feel like giving me another chance?” Not likely. She'd probably moved on by now, found someone else. Someone who could be what she wanted, what she needed. Someone better than him.

Damn low bar to clear, really.

Nate shook his head and took another drink. God, he'd been so stupid. He was deep enough in his own depressing thoughts that he didn't notice the other person at the bar until they spoke. “Buy me a drink, sailor?”


End file.
